Sometimes I look back on this blog and feel like my entries used to be so much better, with richer details and more life to them. Even when I was writing something dumb, it was more kinetic and interesting. These days, I often feel stupider, more inclined to make dumb mistakes, and overall less creative. I wonder if I'm just old and tired, or if it's a Covid thing. I leave my house less; I talk to less people and see less things every day than I used to. 

And maybe some of it is whatever long effects I might have from the really bad bout of Covid I had back in April. In the last month, my hair has been falling out. Well, not like falling out in chunks, but when I brush it or run my hands through it, I end up with a handful of shed hair instead of one or two pieces. It still looks normal, but it was freaking me out. I finally looked it up and apparently it's associated with having a super high fever for multiple days, like happened exactly to me when I had it. It sets in a few months afterward because of some kind of chemical effect that body trauma has on a hair level, similar to how POW sometimes have their hair turn white because of body response to torture. Thankfully, this minor version is supposed to go away in a couple months, and it's not like I don't have hair to spare. I was relieved to have an answer to why it was happening, but it also spooked me a little bit, thinking about what a big impact that actually had on my body even if I feel mostly normal now, if stupider. 

I had a beautiful weekend in the woods. I don't think I've been to the site in over a year, maybe even back to when we first took Bean there as a puppy, although now I'm second guessing that. I have a vague memory of going to it last year and finding a cardinal flower on the bank that had grown there every year, but also, a yellow jacket nest  - which of course, I took as a sign and omen. The general static of anger in the universe toward me. The curse. 

The yellow jackets were gone this time, but there were cardinal flowers. I tried to take that sign as a generous one, but who can say? If any universal spite was lessened toward me, would I even know it? It was raining in the beautiful, dreamy way that it does out there sometimes. That always makes the veil between sleep, life, past, present, and future feel thin. The whole weekend and now, continuing into this week I have been absolutely brimming with dreams. Last night, I even dreamed about the first dog we had when I was a baby: an English bulldog named Brittany. I dream the usual things too - always the conversations. 

If yellow jackets were a recurring theme last summer, this summer might be water: finding it, submerging myself in it. If the weekend before last was swimming with the snakes, last weekend was the reservoir. It's further down the dirt road past the real lake - a huge concrete dam that rises abruptly up out of the woods. It's dangerous to swim too near to the dam itself because of the pumps and currents, but further in, there was a kind of beach under some ancient, towering rock structure. The water was so warm - almost hot, unusual for that area - and maybe it was my imagination, but I could feel something pulling at me, plucking me deeper toward the middle where the current was. When the storm came, it was nice to climb up under the natural cliff shelter the towering rocks created. I think it must be very primordial: something about my hunter gatherer brain that liked being up under a rock shelter that surely people have used on this continent for thousands of years, looking at the storm but safely out of it. The reservoir of course wasn't there, but those overhang shelters are all over Appalachia and it's a good bet they were used.